1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer using a recording paper roll formed of long recording paper wound around a core, particularly, a printer that prints image data taken by a digital camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with the spread of digital cameras, a printer that can print an image by directly connecting to the digital camera or inserting a memory card thereto without using a personal computer has been put to practical use. To distinguish from a conventional printer to be connected to the personal computer, such a printer is referred to as “a digital camera-enabled printer”.
In the digital camera-enabled printer, thermal recording paper is adopted to obtain substantially the same print quality as a film photo using a conventional film and photographic paper. Since the size of the image to be printed is subject to the film photo system, it is required to correspond to the aspect ratio of general imaging devices and especially, an oblong print such as panoramic print. Thus, generally, the digital camera-enabled printer supports various sizes of images by using a recording paper roll formed of long recording paper wound around a cylindrical core, fixing the size of one of vertical and horizontal sides of the image to be printed to the width of the recording paper and changing the length of recording paper to be cut according to the size of the other side.
In the above-mentioned digital camera-enabled printer using the thermal recording paper, an image is formed on a sheet of recording paper with using a thermal recording head. In the printer having the thermal recording head, to make coloring of the image properly, it is necessary to preheat the thermal recording head to a proper temperature prior to the formation of the image. While the preheating of the thermal recording head, the recording paper is placed between a platen roller and the thermal recording head so as not to deteriorate the thermal recording head. When the thermal recording head is preheated with the recording paper being contacted with the thermal recording head in this manner, the contact portion of the recording paper is heated and coloring occurs at the heated portion, and thus becomes useless for the print of the image.
Then, in the conventional digital camera-enabled printer, the heated portion heated in which coloring occurs during preheating of the recording head is cut after the formation of an image desired by a user on the recording paper. The cut piece is fractionally removed from the paper sheet on which the image is formed. The cut pieces thus generated are generally disposed of and cannot be used effectively.
In a conventional printer, for example, shown in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2003-174553, an advertisement data is combined with an original image data and the combined image data is used for forming an image with an advertisement on a paper sheet. In another conventional printer, for example, shown in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2002-86816, an advertisement is variously printed on a paper sheet corresponding to time-zone or a day of the week.